I watched the Formula 1 the other morning.

I got up especially, which is the only manner in which anyone should be up and moving at 6am in the morning. We have discussed before how awful I am with early morning starts, I truly do require a minimum of nine hours of a night in order to feel human. I digress somewhat, of course, but this does all build up to me falling asleep during the Australian Grand Prix.

It had all the ingredients of a stonker, but then so does a soufflé and they often turn out flat. My heart started to sink as Martin Brundle’s grid walk halted, spluttered and dropped. Maybe I’d opened the oven too soon, but he started off by peering through a fence, wandered aimlessly about waving his arms at technical things for a few minutes and then chatted to a couple of. Of course, they answered in the inane way that these guys do when there is a PR thrusting a dictaphone menacingly in their chops. Martin’s grid walk ended suddenly, presumably with him sashaying away from the camera and then scurrying up to his new position in the commentary box.

I enjoyed Brundle’s turn behind the lead microphone, it has to be said. From deep in his depths he has mustered some previously unregistered enthusiasm, presumably for not playing the straight patsy to the bumbling banshee stood next to him. And yet his immutable authority remains. It must have been frustrating, all those years in the shadow of successive channels trying to shape people in Murray Walker’s image. Actually, he’s probably used to playing the perennial sidekick, he never managed to win a race in Formula 1 – but now he’s shown them, he has become the all-seeing eye with a sidekick of his own.

Marty and DC sounds like a fairly low-grade 80s hip-hop duo, but even the combined talents of Martin and David Coulthard with their razor-sharp incisive incisiveness couldn’t keep me awake for too long. I drifted off sometime after half distance, lulled into a torpor by the rhythmic motion of moveable rear wings that were consistently failing to provide any hot overtaking action. I can usually smell a gimmick a mile off, like a sweaty man wearing cheap aftershave, but I had suspended my cynicism to give this one a real go. Schmuck.

Formula 1 rule makers strike me as an extremely neurotic bunch, so desperately worried that the bottom is going to fall out of their bank accounts. They come up with these wacky yet plausible, apparently simple yet outrageously expensive ideas intended to enthral the masses and provid something worth watching. I’d hate to think what they might do if they heard that someone was falling asleep during their little gatherings of the rich and beautiful, I fear it might give cause to a collective seizure. And yet they never seem to realise that manufactured unpredictability is never quite as exciting as the proper kind. That is, the one you don’t see coming, the one that doesn't have a little on-screen graphic.

But such is life - it does occasionally throw up thrills and excitement but it is mostly quite dull. Which is surely what makes the fun bits that much more exciting and thrilling. Do you know who would know that? Martin Brundle. What a hero.